2014 IMCW Spring Retreat: Intimacy with Life

Vipassana, or Buddhist Meditation, is a way of opening to life and seeing clearly the totality of one’s being and experience. The practice is based on cultivating a present-centered mindfulness, leading to an unfolding of our natural wisdom and compassion. The focus of this retreat is to enhance intimacy with ourselves and the world. In order to help participants discover a sense of stillness and deep listening, silence will be maintained throughout the retreat except during question/answer periods and interviews with the teachers. In addition to sitting and walking meditation practice, there will be sessions of mindful movement led each day by Jonathan Foust.

Survival warrants the arising of certain energies. They are not our enemies. If we treat them as such we are continuing the internal warfare and struggle. By seeing energies like lust, fear, hatred, worry, sleepiness and doubt as our organism loving itself we elicit self compassion and understanding....the perfect healing energies and perspective to then move forward into greater ease and connection with all life.

Drawing on Henri Nouwen’s book that interprets this famous parable, this talk looks at the ways we cut off from loving awareness, and the process of homecoming. Our inquiry, reflections and a guided meditation focus on an essential and often overlooked element of transformation: our capacity to trust in love, to let love in.

As we cultivate mindfulness we become increasingly aware of how we move through huge swaths of our life in trance. This talk reflects on three key domains of trance, and undoing the habitual reactivity that keeps us from the loving, open awareness that is our essence.